Back in the 90’s Buffy put a new more feminist face on the vampire story. Then Bella came along and quickly implanted sparkly vampires into every teenage girl’s fantacy. I have to be honest, I didn’t particularly like Dracula when I read it back in college, and I never watched Buffy. I did enjoy the Twilight series, it might not be high art, but it is definately entertaining.
I watched New Moon a week ago and enjoyed that a lot too. The CGI of the wolves was a bit corny, and the actor playing Jacob is a lot hotter than the actor playing Edward, which detracted from the Edward is the hottest man alive plot point. But for the most part I felt that it stuck to the plot of the book and entertained sufficently.
Last weekend I also caught my first eposode of The Vampire Diaries. Granted I did see a mid-season episode without any pervious context, but I wasn’t thrilled with what I saw. From the one episode I caught I figured out that some of the vampires are good and others are bad and they are living among humans and fighting for blood and justice. While these TV vampires don’t glitter in the sun, they do match more of the Twilight world rules than the Dracula world rules. Mainly I just felt like Vampire Diaries is trying to ride the Twilight money making wave, and the show wasn't adding anything new or interesting to the world of vampires.
Today I listened to a completely different vampire novel – You Suck by Christopher Moore. You Suck is nothing like Twilight, it attempts to be a humorous version of Dracula and I half expect Moore has never read anything written by Meyer. If you love Twilight but generally hate horror, You Suck probably isn’t for you. But if you enjoy a humorous spoof on horror that pokes fun at human fears and desires, then you will probably love You Suck.
Here is a longer list of comparisons between the vampires of Meyer and Moore
YOU SUCK
Bodies go lifeless (effectively dead) at sunrise
Passionate biting sex
Shave a cat before drinking its blood to avoid a mouth full of hair
Can drink from humans without killing them
Vampire gets drunk after feeding on drunken homeless guy
Vampires need human minuons (normally goth teenagers) to do their bidding during the day
The humane way to hunt is to eat terminally ill patiants shortly before they would die anyway
TWILIGHT
Bodies sparkle in the sun
Steamy hand holding but absolutely no sex before marrage
Hunting for mountain lions in the woods without getting remotely dirty
Biting a human can lead only to death or transformation and is always painful for human
Nobody does drugs or drinks alcohol in Forks
Vampires must keep their identities hidden under all costs
The humane way to hunt is to eat animals
Joke of the Day
What does a vampire fear most?
Tooth Decay
4 comments:
Vampire Diaries is really good once you get a few episodes in! I've been following it all season. The book series was actually written in early 90's and is even better than the show!
I've never heard of You Suck, but I laughed at the comparison list with Twilight - too funny!
Jumping on a soap box in defense of Vampires. =p
"I just felt like Vampire Diaries is trying to ride the Twilight money making wave"
Just a quick note here. The Vampire Diaries were written by LJ Smith back in 1990 or 91. They were WAY before Meyers penned Twilight. People are a little too Twilight crazy for my taste. Meyers isn't the only one out there writing vampires and vampires aren't just for kids.
I will add this though. Twilight revitalized the market with it's unique take, but It is not the only one out there in the spotlight. It might have helped pave the way, but I don't agree that others are riding the money wave.
Vampires span all Genres from Horror to erotica.
If your ever interested in looking at some more adult vampires try out these authors.
Anne Rice
Laurel K Hamilton
Christine Feehan
Lara Adrian
Charlaine Harris (wrote a series -southern vampire mysteries- that has been adapted an plays on HBO. It's called True Blood.
Each one of these authors has a slightly different take on vamps.
And there are so many more out there.
Wow! Who knew a brief comment that I'm not a huge fan of a CW tv show would ruff so many feathers. I don't love 90210 much either, are you going to hate on me for that too?
My main intension of this post was to talk about the very funny vampire novel "You Suck", which is based on the more traditional dracula, creature of the night, type vampire than the new teen heart throb type vampire that has been overly popularized by things like Twilight and the Vampire Diaries.
But since all anyone reading this post seems to care about is that I'm not a faithful fan of television, lets talk about that instead. I haven't read the Vampire Diaries books, and I have only watched one episode of the TV show. I didn't hate the TV show, but I didn't love it enough to program my TiVo to record anymore episodes of it either. I just thought it was an average teenage drama that happend to have some characters wanting to suck the blood of a few of the other characters.
And I guess in a way that was my point all along. When did vampires become supper sexy characters that teenage girls want to fantacize about? Sure the whole biting a person on the neck thing is a fairly erotic activity and even the classic dracula story had its titalating moments, but until recently I haven't thought of 14 year old girls as the main conisure of vampire entertainment. 14 year old boys maybe - but 14 year old boys would like You Suck a lot more that the Bella/Edward/Jacob love triangle.
And while I have very very very little knowledge of the entire Vamprie Diaries world, this I do know. The vampires on the TV show are pretty much all hot teenage boys who seem to be in assorted love triangles with hot human girls. Maybe the show would have been made even if Stephanie Meyer's first novel was The Host (which is an awesome book by the way). But regardless, I'm guessing the vast majority of the people who do have the Vampire Diaries programmed into their TiVo have read Twilight, and probably there aren't very many of them who have read the prose of Bram Stoker.
Post a Comment